Hill tweeters lock out LegiStorm

Hundreds of users of the Congress-focused research organization LegiStorm have locked their Twitter accounts after the organization moved to aggregate their tweets last week, the head of LegiStorm told POLITICO, noting that the upheaval has sparked changes at the company.

POLITICO reported last week that Capitol Hill erupted as staffers learned that their tweets and Twitter accounts were compiled via a tool called StormFeed, published on the subscription site LegiStorm Pro. The organization on Friday started counting how many people on LegiStorm Pro made their accounts private, LegiStorm founder and President Jock Friedly told POLITICO.

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The bulk of the privacy status changes seem to have come from Hill staffers, he said — so far at least an estimated 266 have locked their Twitter accounts.

Friedly noted that there are 1,798 congressional staffers in the LegiStorm Pro database; of those, 651 have protected their accounts.

“Presumably a large percentage of that 266 number I gave you before is … staffers, presumably, because that’s who this story is focused on,” he said, citing POLITICO’s story from last week. “It sounds like probably about half of these locking accounts, of this 651, my guess is about half of those occurred since last week.”

Friedly said that in light of the responses from the Hill, LegiStorm reviewed Twitter’s terms of service and determined that if users mark their Twitter accounts as “private,” LegiStorm can expedite the process of hiding their tweets from other users on the site, which is free for Capitol Hill staffers. Initially, it was expected to take “days and days and days for us to be able to guarantee a staffer was moved from the system.” But a closer look revealed that the whole process should now only take about three hours.

“It’s certainly a response to people wanting it to be private,” he said. “Yes, it’s fair to say it’s a response to what happened last week.”